Two experiments examined the role of perceptual complexity, object familiarity and form class cues on how children interpret novel adjectives and count nouns. Four-year-old children participated in a forced-choice match-to-target task in which an exemplar was named with a novel word and children were asked to choose another one that matched the exemplar in either shape or material In experiment...

Nouns Proper Names

Italian and dialects express indefiniteness in different ways, among which with a null determiner (ZERO) like all other Romance languages, but also the definite article (ART) unlike what is found Romance. some northern display so-called “partitive determiner” DI+ART, present French. Few northwestern (bare) DI, parallel to We adopt Cardinaletti Giusti’s (2015, 2016) unified analysis build on (20...

A patient (F.A.) is described who, as a consequence of brain damage, shows an isolated deficit concerning the use, across a series of tasks, of the grammatical properties of mass/non-countable nouns. Her use of grammar is otherwise perfect. This behaviour dissociates from that of other patients who have severe grammatical difficulties, but do not show any impairment in the mass nouns tasks that...

Philosophers and psychologists of language have coined the term "sortal" to refer to the concepts which underpin count nouns. A sortal is a concept which provides criteria for individuation and numerical identity. Criteria for individuation are the basis for counting; we cannot count without specifying a count noun such as "cat" or "table". Criteria for numerical identity (in the sense of one a...

Two subject-verb agreement error elicitation studies tested the hierarchical feature-passing account of agreement computation in production and three timing-based alternatives: linear distance to the head noun, semantic integration, and a combined effect of both (a scope of planning account). In Experiment 1, participants completed subject noun phrase (NP) stimuli consisting of a head NP follow...

Given the two sentences “this fake cat has a fluffy tail” and “this tabby cat has a fluffy tail”, only the second allows one to conclude that “there exists a cat that has a fluffy tail”. As is obvious to a native English speaker, the adjective (A) “fake” somehow modifies the noun (N) “cat” such that we conclude that it no longer belongs to the set of N (cats) by virtue of being A (fake). Lingui...

Two experiments investigated how readers comprehend noun phrase (NP) arguments and adjuncts. Previous research suggested that argument phrases are processed more quickly than adjunct phrases (Clifton, Speer, & Abney, 1991; Kennison, 1999; Schütze & Gibson, 1999; Speer & Clifton, 1998). The present experiments investigated whether the type of verb in the sentence context could influence how NP a...